I heard an interview with Stephen Hayes a while ago. He said it is a paper trail SEVEN MILES long! So I think that 489K boxes is accurate.
WOO HOO!!! Let the truth be told!
OOPS. Should be 48K boxes. Nice typing. ;^)
The average banker's box -- usually the type used for documents -- holds perhaps 3000 documents. At 11 inches long each, that's somewhere around 2700 feet worth of documents. Roughly half a mile. So a trail of documents 7 miles long is going to be about 14-15 boxes. Nothing close to 489,000 boxes, or even 48,000 boxes. Or even 48 boxes.
Far more likely is that its not 48k boxes of documents, but rather 48,000 actual documents. At 11 inches per document, that's about 44,000 feet of documents, or somewhere over 8 miles of docs. Figure that some of them may be memo-sized rather than 8.5 X 11, and there's your 7 miles.